1983 ~ 1993: The Cabal

After its humble birth in 1979, Usenet flourished at a surprising
rate, leading to various problems and headaches for its developers
and users. In an attempt to establish collaboration between
Usenet site administrators to more easily resolve these issues,
Mark Hortonorganized
a list of large Usenet sites and the contact information for their
administrators. That list would remain dormant for a few years until
Gene Spafford became a
Usenet administrator at Georgia Tech. He took Horton's list of hosts
and facilitated conversations between their operators. This group would
become the Backbone Cabal. Horton is considered the organizer of the
'physical' backbone Cabal, while Spafford established the 'political'
Cabal.

When asked about the impetus behind the organization of the political
aspect of the Cabal, Gene Spafford detailed:

"When I took over the administration of Usenet on the Georgia Tech
machines in about 1983, I noted that it took a long time for some
articles to propagate, and often discussion threads got all out of
order for many of us who were trying to follow many subthreads. So,
I looked at the "map" of connections that Mark had put together. This
was in the early 1980s, and Mark's original "backbone" was in it. I
identified a set of about 10 machines that had high capacity links,
many subfeeds, and seemed to be maintained by clueful people. I
contacted them one at a time and suggested cross linking that they
might establish to reduce latency and increase redundancy. Most
agreed. We ended up with a pretty robust "core" which was the new
backbone."

Issues that Cabal members commonly addressed included approving new
newsgroups, managing article propagation, and otherwise attending to
the administrative needs of the rapidly growing network.

The Backbone Cabal played a large part in
The Great Renaming which
created the hierarchy and naming structure that is still used to create
and organize Usenet newsgroups today. This reorganization was made
possible by the influence that the Cabal had earned amongst the Usenet
community, but, ironically, the voting system that was implemented with
the Great Renaming resulted in the lessening of the Cabal's power.

Though rumors of the Cabal's activity survived into the late 1990s,
it is generally agreed that the Cabal's active years ended in 1993
when Gene Spafford withdrew from his Usenet duties and moved on to
new projects.